The US government has identified "more than six members of the Russian government" involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee's computers and leaking information during last year's presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Justice Department officials are in the early stages of deciding whether to …

Well, then, there won't be any evidence that will stand up in court, will there, and you - uh, /they/ won't have anything to worry about. Goodness, how silly the Feds are going to look when they have to stand there in court, red-faced, and confess that they just made it all up.

Are the Russians meant to have helped Trump win or were they trying to help Clinton? It seems to vary every time I read about this. Some reports say that the Russians were trying to undermine democracy by highlighting social inequalities in the States - which either exist so should be highlighted, or if the social inequalities don't exist wouldn't it be easy to show otherwise - hence no undermining? My understanding hasn't been helped either by Trump alienating nearly all of the media so that any reports of what he says is going to be (deservedly?) biased against him?

I somehow suspect that even if they had a 3000fps full colour 4k video of Kennedy's assassination in which the bullet could be seen leaving the barrel of Lee's gun and tearing into Kennedy, wolfetone would still be pointing at the "Babushka" asking "but what about her?"

> "Well, those selfsame people are still claiming that the illuminati are spying on us via fillings..."

Yes, we know. Your 'side' has declared those emails to have been 'hacked' so anyone who looks at the evidence and thinks differently is a nutter by proclamation. Never mind that the emails have been shown forensically to have been copied far too rapidly for it to have been done via a web connection. Forget about how Rich (who was in a perfect position to take the emails and who had a strong motive to do so) was gunned down late at night on the street, with nothing taken from the body. Forget that the killing happened just a week after the emails showed up.

re: have been copied far too rapidly for it to have been done via a web connection

Nutters

Those same nutters told us they'd be a mossad op at 9/11 which would start 7 wars in the middle east.

Nutter General Wesley Clark even had a list from Wolofowitz you can see him chatting about on youtube.

Since then we've had Christopher Bollyn and others debunk 9/11 and seen Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Yemen all attacked and the same people itching to get to the bottom of the list where Iran sits.

They also told us the US wasn't in Syria to fight ISIS, they were after Assad.

Now ISIS is gone the US is officially saying they are staying to depose Assad.

Clearly we should only listen to people like Blair who told us about Saddam's WMDs and that Gaddafi always left the toilet seat up and thus had to be destroyed.

Next we'll have NASA telling us there's loads of water on the moon but Buzz missed it because he was concentrating on his golf stroke...

Either it was criminally negligent security on a crappy home email server that would let any GOP script kiddie in or it was super military grade system that only a crack team of Russian government cyber ninjas could have broken into.

Re: if the old card game taught me anything

Crack teams

If it was a crack team of Russian government cyber ninjas then I am sure they used the very basic practice of randomizing IP and MAC addresses. All hackers worth their salt automate that step and have their router check for it as redundancy.

The only way a Russian address would be in there if somebody intentionally put it in.

Re: Crack teams

ROFL!!

Why yes, randomised IP addresses are essential when setting the src IP in the packets you send at your target to set up a TCP connection. That way it has no idea where to route it's responses and errrrr oh wait.

Re: Crack teams

I think what he was getting at as I'm sure everyone knows is that if you are going to hack you need to hop through compromised systems that don't keep logs. The randomisation is by switching compromised systems so your IP doesn't stay the same for long allowing whoever is looking to trace your packets back to you. The reasons Russia always get fingered in these things is that it is politically useful and if you are going to hack you would want to take your hack via a country that the other country doesn't have access to the backbone.

It is for these reasons unless you catch someone in the act at a computer you can never say who it is.

I'm guessing the downvoters trust the American government to be completely honest and that identifying a person is infallible when using the tried and trusted method of "identified tools and techniques used", maybe if they get them they could confirm it with a lie detector just to be absolutely sure.

Unless someone would like to correct me.

Maybe they got these tools from Kapersky after Israel hacked them? Maybe they share them with North Korea? I think China could possibly have had a hand in this by paying for their lunches and don't get me started on Iraq sending them thank you notes.

Finally if they are using identified tools and techniques used then why are they only now bringing charges considering that method would imply they already identified them in relation to a previous hack? Could it be the subject hacked and the current climate in America?

Gee, I dunno,... maybe that's because the indictments haven't been filed or opened yet. But no, they're not open yet, therefore there IS no evidence and never will be.

D'you ever listen to The News Quiz on Radio 4? D'you remember Miles Jupp's description of the F.A. management who appeared before the DCMS Select Committee the other week? Cos it's an arsewit carnival here today, too.

Fake news!

LOL ignore what was FOUND

and focus on WHO broke the thing open. Genius media manipulation right there.

Reverse the parties, and NO ONE would care WHO cracked it open, but WHAT was found.

"sure we found a hundred TB of child pron, six crates of pure cocaine, and admissions to the Lindberg kidnapping- but was the thief who cracked the storage unit open an illegal immigrant, and which nation sent him?"

Incident response firm Mandiant ..

Isn't it a co-incidence that Mandiant found evidence of Russian hacking considering that Russia is Washington's current international bogeyman. While Mandiant is at it, why not investigate who at the CIA hacked into the US Senate intelligence committee tasked with investigating CIA torture. Mandiant, owned by FireEye the cyber security outfit run by Israeli Intelligence. I'd be more worried about Israeli Intelligence having such deep tendrils into the US security infrastructure. Are stories such as the above designed to distract from the real buggers.

Re: Incident response firm Mandiant ..

The most depressing thing is that you morons are real humans, and have accounts and posting histories showing you're not software or being paid by Putin. You're just exceptionally dimwitted. God help us when the war comes.

Re: Incident response firm Mandiant ..

Re: Incident response firm Mandiant ..

God help us when the war comes.

Please enlighten us, oh neocon lord!

Pretty depressing that El Reg actually filters commentary linking to the debunking of both the "DNC hack" fakery and the "US intelligence community unanimous" NYT-peddled crap. Instead we get McCarthy screeds (Kieren or otherwise).

Re: Incident response firm Mandiant ..

@Tom Paine: "The most depressing thing is" ..

The UK has blood on its hands. What's happening in Syria, a war crime that Americas best buddy is happy to be complicit in. If the editors didn't see need to repost neocon propaganda on here, then I wouldn't see the need to respond with some facts.

Ah, Russians

I'm guessing the six Russian officials are still in Russia? So all the US has to do is extradite them to the US to answer questions and possibly stand trial. Should be pretty easy. I mean, they got Edward Snowden after just a couple of days, right? What? You mean this is all political hand-waving and impotent finger-pointing? Say it isn't so...

Two separate incidents, John Podesta's eMail "hacked" by the standard "please change your email password" phishing technique - the sort of thing any email administrator sees hundreds of every day, and a slightly more elaborate hack of the DNC server(s). The DNC servers have been examined only by a private firm (run by an anti-Russian fanatic) and that server has NOT been investigated by any of the intelligence people, that is none, zip, nada.They're taking Crowdstrike's info on their word; the DNC REFUSED to let their server be examined by the FBI - possibly scared of what they might find !

So any attribution to any Russians is pure speculation and spin. Then there's the very strange saga of "Guccifer 2" claiming to be the person behind the hack. A person who uses "Felix Dzerzhinsky" as a handle in the documents, and the strange case of 4 sets of "Russian" meta-data inserted into stale hacked DNC documents (only 4, and definitely inserted into documents that didn't have that metadata to start with). The dates and times, though obfuscated, point to the hack being perpetrated from a location using EST (Eastern Standard Time - in the US), adds further to the underlying mysterious nature of the whole affair.

"Identified" as the key verb here.

Identifying who is in some position.

I doubt that anything they have in hand would put these six "officials" in charge of a keyboard used to "hack" the DNC. Interesting that it took that long to figure out the hierarchy of Russian intelligence.

Personally I suspect that some idiot had a backup of some portion of the DNC's data sitting on a usb key that ended up under some leaves on someone's sidewalk in Dnepropetrovsk. "Just on accident". Due to an "outsourcing" error. By some cloud hosting company. With three letters in its name.

Hacking 101

Everybody pay close attention.

1. ALWAYS change your IP address

2. ALWAYS change your MAC address

3. SPOOF a fake IP / MAC address if you want somebody else to be blamed.

These steps are AUTOMATED for anybody that knows what they are doing, and nation states have their Routers check to make sure it's all randomized or spoofed and if it's not all trafic from their side is prevented.

Russia making a mistake like that is like forgetting to put on your shoes as you walk out into the snow. it just doesn't happen.

Russia is everywhere, it is even the opposition!

The weekend after Trump’s election, thousands of people attended a left-wing anti-Trump protest in New York City that was secretly organized by Russian operatives, ads released by the House Intelligence Committee revealed.

Where is Gordon Freeman? We need him to shore up the Resistance and have him get Breen, I mean Putin.

In other news, Congress thinks people are dumb as bricks (makes you wonder what they think they are accomplishing by having people vote in the first place?): Great Moments in Congressional Hearings

I get why Russian-paid trolls are posting the crap about Set Rich, but I really hope people realize it's garbage. Even some of the alt-reality spinners at Fox had to admit it's untrue (although they already knew that). In fact, it's utter shit, and his own family has pleaded with people to stop. So please stop it. Propagating this crap just adds to their pain.

Seth Rich

We have avid Bernie Sanders supporter Seth Rich, who watched the DNC sabotage his candidate and fatally decides to hand a memory stick of email data to Wikileaks (corroborated by Kim Dotcom and pretty much by Assange too).

Then there's a Podesta email saying they're going to make an example of leakers and shortly after Seth gets whacked (not a robbery as nothing was stolen).

So we have clear Means, Motive and Opportunity for Seth Rich, together with his death - a hallmark of people around the Clintons - the body count is around 115 so far IIRC.

On the other side we have Mueller and his FBI (who has never inspected the DNC server - they only let their private contractor 'Crowdstrike' near that, and it's Crowdstrike who told everyone it was the Russians).

So the FBI has zero evidence it was a Russian hacker. The NSA has no evidence. Neither does the CIA. Or the State department. Or the DOD.

So yes, obviously we need to finger 6 Russians for it, it all makes perfect sense. CNN told us it was the Russians, so it MUST be true.